English language teaching and learning in China has achieved enormous prosperity in recent years.It is said that the number of people learning and speaking English in China possibly exceeds the total population of the United States and Britain combined.However,the development of English language education in China has experienced several diverse phases and problems and controversies kept emerging especially when a new teaching approach was introduced.Based on the current situation,this paper tries to provide a comprehensive and in-depth overview on English language education in China.This paper is generally divided into two parts.Part one outlines the development of English language education in China with regard to the place of English and the development of teaching approaches.Part two discusses the recent teaching approach promoted official,its progress as well as problems.The focus of the whole paper is on secondary-level education as this is the stage when most students study English.
Having been implemented since the year 1987, College English Test(CET) is now a national English test used to measure college students' English language competence and promote English language teaching and learning in classrooms. And later in 1999 national CTE committee launched College English Test-Spoken English Test(CET-SET) and started to include speaking as one part but not a compulsory part of this assessment. Now still only a small group of candidates can take CET- SET,which suggested by many researchers could bring harmful backwash to classroom teaching. Therefore, this paper presents a study and evaluation of CET-SET for college students in China. It mainly divides into four parts. Part one gives an introduction about the teaching contexts of college students and their needs for English study. Part two discusses the harmful backwash from CET as well as the reasons and needs to introduce and recommend CET-SET. The third part sheds light on the strengths of CETSET including its beneficial backwash, the test format and the scoring system. The last part talks about its weakness and provide some suggestions and modifications.
